Motherhood and Love

Love: A Question for Feminism?

Monday, April 28, 6pm
Venue: IWM, Spittelauer Lände 3, 1090 Wien

The panel discussion will focus on the collected volume Love: A Question for Feminism in Twenty-First Century (Routlege, 2013) edited by Anna Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson. The issues discussedin the book include feminist materialist philosophy and sociology of love, contradictions of feminist approaches to love and sexuality, problems of contemporary appropriations of love and affective labor, love globally and resistance/oppression dimensions in love theory and practice. The book editors argue that a new discipline – love studies – should follow several decades of feminist research concerning affective labor, love and love power, and reproductive labor, thus allowing a reappropriation of both theory and practice of love in a transcultural, globalized world.

Anna Jónasdóttir, feminist political scientist, professor emerita at the University of Örebro, Sweden; author of several feminist analysis of love labor including Why Women Are Oppressed? (Temple University Press 1994).

Eleanor Wilkinson, feminist social scientist and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK; author of ‘Learning to love again: Broken families, citizenship and the state promotion of coupledom’ (Geoforum, 2013)

Matka Polka, the archetypal Polish mother traditionally embodying patriotism, sacrifice, and unconditional love, is a much debated concept in Poland. A sociocultural and historically embedded construct, the Matka Polka image has evolved since its emergence in the 19th century, appropriating various additional meanings and features over the years: the mother fighter, the resourceful mother, or, most recently, the neoliberal supermother. The speakers in the panel will address the complexities entailed in the Matka Polka figure and scrutinize its historical and contemporary functions including, importantly, the impact of migration on mothering practices and discourses on motherhood in Poland and Europe.

Agata A. Lisiak, cultural scientist, researcher in the TRANSFORmIG project at Humboldt University in Berlin, lecturer at Bard College Berlin, and Junior EURIAS Fellow at the IWM in Vienna; author of Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe (Purdue University Press 2010)